“The historian here cannot begin his work at all unless he can live in sympathy into the details of an apparently outworn creed and recognise the truth in the first imperfect adumbrations of it. The attitude of the mere narrator has, in the case of the historian of philosophy, to be exchanged, as far as possible, for that of the sympathetic interpreter. There is the danger, no doubt, of too easily reading one’s philosophic creed into the history, but the opposite danger is more serious still. It is the danger of taking the philosophic type studied as a historic curiosity rather than a recipe for the human soul, and of seeking to explain the curiosity by natural causes instead of seriously examining its merits as philosophy. This unfortunately is sometimes the defect of Western expositions of Eastern philosophy and religion.”

(K.C. Bhattacharyya, Studies in Philosophy, Motilal Banarsidas, 1983, p. 2 —Thanks to Elise Coquereau-Saouma for the pointer).